


As An Old Memoria

by anomalation



Category: The Turn of the Screw - Henry James, The Turning (2020)
Genre: 90s AU, Found Family, Gen, Ghosts as Metaphor for our Traumas, Inappropriate Behavior, New England, Past Child Abuse, Past Sexual Abuse, Questionable Curriculum
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-07
Updated: 2020-10-31
Packaged: 2021-03-07 16:33:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 14
Words: 18,977
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26870704
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/anomalation/pseuds/anomalation
Summary: A blog from the point of view of a certain nanny, who's pretty sure she's not going crazy and that something is actually seriously wrong at Bly Manor.
Relationships: Nanny & Flora Fairchild, Nanny & Miles Fairchild
Comments: 23
Kudos: 17





	1. Hello World!

**Author's Note:**

> You could read this here, or you could read it on the [custom 90s blog I built](http://as-an-old-memoria.blog) for it, complete with gifs and garish colors. The website will always be one post ahead. I'll be updating every other day until Halloween. Enjoy!

I need to keep my thoughts straight. Things have been such a rollercoaster the last couple of months and you’ve been my rock. But I haven’t told you even a sliver of what really went on, so that’s what I’ve fired this blog up for. It will be a record of the things I haven’t been to tell you out loud.

(For anyone else reading, welcome! But I doubt anyone cares about a teacher who moved to the middle of nowhere in Connecticut to be a tutor and ended up tragically haunted. This is mainly for me, and my best friend Douglas who wants to know why I’ve basically disappeared. And I’ve probably sounded actually insane on the phone trying to explain all of this, so maybe writing it all down will make a little more sense.)

Okay. So you know the whole story about how the estate found me and hired me last summer, because you were there for that part. But just for the sake of whatever hypothetical stranger stumbles on this, I’ll just say that the point of everything with him was that I can’t bother him. He wanted nothing to do with these kids.

That wasn’t exactly a promising way to start this. I remember you calling it a red flag. You were more right than you knew. But I was optimistic. I think I said something like I’m sure he’s just busy and not everybody’s cut out to be a parent and at least he cares enough to hire someone to care for him.

All stupidly naive things to say. Even though he was busy, and he definitely wasn’t cut out to be a parent, I’d struggle to call anything he did caring. If he cared, he wouldn’t have left them with Quint for years.

I’m getting ahead of myself. I’m going to be chronological about this, I swear, so you can follow the journey the way I’ve lived it.

So. My first day there.

The valet treatment continued all the way to the front door of Bly Manor. A car picked me up from the airport just like the one that got me from our apartment. I tried to ask the driver about the family, get some intel, but he was from a service and didn’t know any more than the address. Basically, I was going in blind. I only knew the names of the kids - Miles and Flora Fairchild - and that I was supposed to be in charge of them when they’re home. For Flora, that’d be full-time - she was ten, that’s where the nannying will come in. For Miles, who was sixteen, I was planning on watching him on holidays, when he was back from the fancy boarding school. Manageable.

There would be a couple other people around, the housekeeper and a gardener that worked every other Friday. Other than that, the house and the children were mine. A dream job, right? Working one-on-one with a kid, saving up some money to finish paying off my student loans. It seemed great. Of course I took the job. A year for starters, and we’d reevaluate then.

When I got there, though, when we drove through orderly trees and sprawling lawns for four minutes before the house was in view, the doubt settled in hard. As much as I teach - taught - at a certain expensive private school that shall not be named, I’m upper class adjacent at best. I know enough to not react at the right moments, but I have no reference point for the life these kids were used to. Seemed like a safe bet to assume they’d be spoiled. I readied myself to know very little about their hobbies and interests.

The housekeeper didn’t make me feel any better. “The children are delicate,” she warned me out of nowhere, after a minute or so of uncomfortable small talk. It had begun with her telling me her name was Mrs. Grose, and had gone downhill from there.

“Oh,” I said, or something equally as smart.

“Impressionable,” she added. I remember that word in particular because it felt so strange to me. All children their age are impressionable. I taught fourth grade until two days before our conversation - did she really think I needed special warning? But I nodded and was generally agreeable. And then, as soon as I could, I asked her where Flora was so I could meet her too.

“She’s in her suite,” Mrs. Grose said, and gave me directions so quick and sparse that there was no mistaking this for anything but my first test. Not like she didn’t like me, that wasn’t the impression I got, but more like she’d been burned before.

The uncle hadn’t said much about the person who tutored Flora before. I didn’t think anything of it at the time. This was the first inkling I got that something might’ve happened. And, like an idiot, I forgot all about it when I met Flora.

You’re fond of telling me I love kids too too much, so you’re going to think I’m exaggerating but Flora was the sweetest little girl in the world. She had long dark hair that fell in waves over her thin shoulders, and sharp dark eyes that could’ve been mischievous if she was ever anything but sweet. That was the thing I noticed most about her, in the first few minutes. Flora was the most agreeable child I’d ever had the pleasure of meeting. She showed me through the entire house for the first few hours, which gave us ample time to get to know each other. And she wasn’t just sweet, she seemed to be able to read me in a way I’d never encountered. She liked what I liked, she asked me questions, she elaborated on things that I showed interest in - she made an effort to be lovable to me. But it was the first day, so I figured it was nothing more than the weirdness of meeting a new adult. Flora would get more normal.

Mrs. Grose made us dinner that night. I put my foot in my mouth basically right away, when I asked why we were eating applesauce and bacon sandwiches for dinner and she informed me it was Flora’s favorite. And Flora was quick to tell me Mrs. Grose would make my favorites, too, but the look Mrs. Grose seemed to disagree. That was fine. I could never ask her to do something like that - it was weird enough having her treating the girl like a princess, I didn’t need the same.

My room, as Flora had shown me earlier, was adjoining hers. I’d asked if she was prone to nightmares or something. “Um, not really,” she said, and amended it right after. “Not anymore. I did when I was a baby.” That struck me as odd. I prepared myself to be woken up, I unpacked so she wouldn’t run into any stray bras or anything. I was ready.

But Flora didn’t wake up with nightmares that night. I did.


	2. The Other Fairchild

Don’t be mad at me leaving you on a cliffhanger - it’s a staple of the genre! And I love horror stories too much to pass up my chance to write about my experience living in one. Hey, I have to try and have fun with this while I can.

I woke up with a start at sunrise, like my subconscious was eager for something to happen. Which was sort of inconvenient because I’d had trouble getting to sleep, too. I was settling back in to try and turn over and get a few more minutes. But no sooner did I do that than Flora hurried in. “Are you awake?” she asked, leaning on the side of my bed and peering at me hopefully.

“How did you know?” I answered with a yawn, and tried to work up a smile for her. My exhaustion wasn’t her fault. “Give me five minutes and privacy to get dressed,” I told her. “Okay? Thank you.”

“Yes ma’am,” Flora chirped, and left, shutting the door behind her.  
We had an easy first day of it. I needed to figure out how she measured up to what I expected a child her age to know, needed to establish a curriculum, to begin to get a feel for how she learned best. Flora was my student when necessary and my pleasant shadow when the schoolwork was over; I hardly noticed her presence when I wasn’t making a point of it. Before I knew it, the sun slipped back behind the horizon, the sky darkening outside all the massive windows of Bly Manor.

Mrs. Grose had provided us food at regular intervals - breakfast at nine, lunch at noon, tea at three, dinner at six. She was still cold with me at breakfast, barely sparing me a look while Flora got an entire smile. I sighed after she left, and Flora had correctly interpreted that as the frustration it was. Not only that, she helped me get on her good side by dinner, with a few well-placed complements and a question about the jam. Flora had informed me that Mrs. Grose canned much of the jam herself and loved to talk about it, and I was genuinely interested. So that smoothed things over at least in the short term, which I hoped would give me time to actually befriend her.

I thanked Flora when I put her to bed. “That was very nice of you, helping me make a better second impression. Thank you.”

“You’re welcome!” Flora watched me tuck her in with a curious sort of half smile on her face. It seemed like she was a million miles a way, but just for a second. Then she brought herself back with a smile so bright it was clearly fake. “You don’t have to be upset about Mrs. Grose,” she said. “She’s just the help.”

“Well that’s not very nice to say.”

“What do you mean? Mr. Quint said it all the time,” Flora said, and then screwed her mouth up small. She wasn’t supposed to say that, I gathered, so I tried not to jump on it too quickly.

“Who’s Mr. Quint?” I asked, in the calmest way I could manage.

“He was our tutor before you,” she answered. And I discovered then, that she did know how to deceive; there was something she wasn’t telling me, hidden in that simple statement. She was good at it, too. I don’t know if anyone else would’ve caught it, but I spent four years in private schools with some of the biggest liars of her generation.

No need to let her know I was onto her. “I see,” I said. “Well. Whether she’s your help or not, she’s still a person who deserves your respect.” I don’t know if that’s exactly what I said, but that was the gist. Basic lesson on respecting others. And yet Flora acted like I’d yelled at her. I had to assure her I wasn’t upset several times before she’d go to sleep.

Impressionable, Mrs. Grose had called her. That was starting to feel like a nice way of saying fragile.

That was fine, though. I’d worked with fragile kids in the past - you may recall the little girl who burst into tears when she spilled her juice. Fragile I can handle. Secrets are a whole other ballgame. It felt like the kind of thing to expect from a family like this, old money and ancestral homes. Like a Kennedy thing, you know? And I wasn’t sure how to deal with that.

And, when I woke up a little past midnight, straight out of a nightmare about unfamiliar presences watching me, I figured it was a pretty straightforward metaphor for my fears. Nothing I couldn’t handle. I got up, pulled my robe on, and went to get a drink from the bathroom down the hall.

The pipes rumbled a little, the water tasted faintly of copper. It’s strange to think how new it felt then. I was leaving the bathroom again, wiping my chin off, when I heard something. Almost certainly the sound of a person, down at the end of the hall and around the corner. A floorboard creaking. Maybe Flora was out of bed, I thought, or Mrs. Grose was on a nightly round. I went to check it out, yawning and trying to hide it. It wasn’t until I was around the corner and down this unfamiliar hallway, the shadows long and deep, that I realized the mistake I made. I was already spooked, this was just freaking me out.

Just when I’d decided to head back to bed, I heard a louder creak than before, from the room right ahead me and to the left. The last room on that side of the hall. So I moved as quietly as I could into the doorway and pushed the door open wider.

The figure made me gasp at first, the way it was dramatically silhouetted in an open window with moonlight outlining it. There was a solid handful of seconds where I thought I was seeing a ghost. I could see his furrowed brow, the way he reached towards me. And then my eyes focused, and it must’ve been just the shapes of trees outside because the figure was gone.

Creepy. Very on trend. But also mundane. I went back to bed, teasing myself for my jumpiness, and I slept decently for the rest of the night.

Which was good. I needed the rest, and the next morning was a doozy.

Flora and I were less than an hour into our day when Mrs. Grose knocked on the door. “Pardon the intrusion,” she said, “but we have a visitor.” Standing with her in the doorway was a boy.

The resemblance between this boy and Flora made it impossible to mistake him for anyone but himself. Miles. The other Fairchild. His eyes were just like his sister’s, his hair nearly as long as hers. Only, his face was much sharper - bonier yes, on the edge of concerning gauntness, but also perceptive. Closed off in some essential way from the first moment he looked at me. He didn’t trust me.  
In retrospect, that was the second red flag.


	3. Scope Creep

With the appearance of her brother, Flora’s focus was ruined for the morning. She hopped up and ran to him for a very tight hug. I watched, sort of taken aback by this big display of emotion. That’s not how Flora had been, that I’d seen. Still, it was also very reassuring that they were close. Easier than them being at odds, certainly.

I introduced myself when I gathered my wits, and asked what had brought him home so soon. The term had just started, break wouldn’t be for almost five months, and I’d been told not to expect him for Thanksgiving.

At that, Miles’ already closed off expression turned even more suspicious. Only for a moment, then he wiped his face clean. I did not like that one bit. “Extra day off,” he said. “I’ll go back Monday.”

“Wonderful,” Mrs. Grose declared it.

I was a little more of two minds. It was good to get a feel for Miles and Flora together, I was happy about that. Seeing the two of them together, dark heads bent over a book or roaming the gardens, I got such a sense for their relationship. They were two of a kind, loyal to each other above all else. It spoke to their childhood better than anything else could, to years of being each others’ only playmate. But that wasn’t the only element of the situation.

See, the thing that made me a little more lukewarm on this situation was how possessive Miles was of Flora, and in a way that made my job hard. Or, maybe possessive isn’t the right word. He spent every moment of our tutoring watching us - watching me, specifically. When I caught him, he always pretended to be doing something else. Sometimes I’d feel eyes on me even when he was clearly busy with Flora, and I’d glance up around the room to find everything normal. No one watching. I was just jumpy, I told myself. It was the strangeness of the situation. He didn’t like me from the start, and everything I did seem to cement that distaste.

So when Monday came and Miles was at breakfast, shooting me looks that dared me to comment on his presence, I took that dare. I kept my cool, though. First I got Flora’s day started with some math problems. We would start with math, I figured, because she enjoyed it the least.

Miles was lurking in the hall during all of that, listening and watching and sullenly pretending not to the moment we made eye contact. I excused myself once Flora was going, stepped out in the hall and asked him to come with me. He did, trailing behind in a way that seemed insolent somehow. I took him to the phone and called his school. He startled, when he heard me introduce myself and ask for the headmaster. Finally, I saw him look at me with something other than resentfulness, but I have to say alarm was not much of an improvement. I didn’t spend very much time thinking about that, though, because I soon found out he had been summarily expelled.

Mrs. Gross, of course, refused to believe it. “Expelled?” she demanded. I’d brought him to her in hopes of having some backup, but found little support. "It can't be," she insisted.

Curiously, I noticed Miles set his jaw when she said that. He objected both to being defended and held accountable, apparently. "Did they tell you why?" he asked me. Perhaps the first thing he'd voluntarily said to me directly.

They did, but that was something I was still sort of grappling with how to handle. There isn't really any training for how to handle a child expelled for something related to homosexuality. The headmaster was too embarrassed to be very specific, but the details he gave me were enough to paint a picture. A picture quite contrary to the one Mrs. Grose had of the boy, but one I didn’t feel it’d be fair to just throw out there. He was supposed to trust me. “Yes," I answered. "They did."

Miles nodded, and for a moment he looked pale.

"I'll have to ask your uncle what to do," I said, thinking as I spoke.

"He won't answer," Miles said. "Didn't he tell you? He doesn't like to be bothered with us." He sounded as grumpy as ever, but for the first time it seemed like I might be on the inside of that feeling with him.

Mrs. Grose assured us both that wasn't true, but then she went on to agree that he probably wouldn't want to be bothered by this. That was kind of unbelievable. When he told me he didn't want to be disturbed with questions, I hadn't taken it that seriously, I guess because it seemed so absurd. He was the guardian of two children, wouldn't he want to know what was happening in their lives? I remember discussing that with you at the time. Another thing you'd been skeptical of.

God, if I'd only listened. But no, in another way I'm glad I didn't.

For the moment, I let this go. Flora had definitely finished her worksheet, so I returned to her and redirected her to an English lesson. A five sentence essay to write, after a short reading. Then I sat at the writing desk that I'd claimed as my own a little ways away from her, and shut my eyes for a second to massage my temples. That day marked my first full week.

"Here," Miles said loudly from directly behind me, and tossed an envelope onto my desk. "You can put that with the others."

"What others?" I asked, surprised and bewildered. I picked up the letter; the return address was the logo of his old school.

"Other letters," he said condescendingly. "Duh. Don't tell me you didn't go through the drawers." Without waiting for an answer, he pulled open one of the many small compartments and extracted a stack of letters. All opened, all bearing the crest of different expensive private schools. And that was all well and good but I was still hung up on this most recent letter. He’d had a letter. He’d hidden it.

“What is this?” I said, picking through the stack. “You’ve been expelled from what, three other private schools?”

“More if you count middle school.”

“How did you know these were here?” I asked, as I scanned the other letters.

“Quint told me.”

Even more confusing, somehow, then knowing nothing. I looked at him with increasing bafflement. “Why was he keeping them?”

Miles shrugged. “Proof of what an awful person I am, I guess.”

What a weird thing to say. I looked down at him. “Miles,” I said. “Why were you expelled?”

“I thought you said they told you.”

“I want to hear it from you, I want to hear your version.”

He found that ludicrous, but decided to humor me. “Okay,” he said, staring straight at me. “I said some stuff and they decided to kick me out for it.”

“What’d you say?”

A shrug again. “Nothing much.”

The headmaster on the phone had called it inappropriate and perverse. Graphically obscene. “Why’d you say it?” I asked.

“Not because I thought they’d tell anybody,” he said, his tone turning from confrontational to almost whiny. Age appropriate. Then he shut his mouth and waited for my response to this absolute refusal to cooperate with what I asked.

And okay. Maybe it was naive of me, but I didn’t feel like pushing him on this was the right thing to do, not right now. Neither option was good - either he’d said something deliberately to be provocative, like boys do when their parents die and their lives are in flux, or he was actually experimenting. Either way, me pressing the issue wouldn’t help anything. It wouldn’t make him trust me any more, and he certainly wouldn’t tell me the truth.

“When you were kicked out before,” I said. “What was the protocol?”

“He’d tutor me too,” Miles said.

So I was supposed to tutor a teenager now? Sure. Right. I called you that night so I won’t rehash the complaints I had. Let’s just say it was a serious case of scope creep.

Still, in the end I figured a class of two would be manageable. Flora was a model student, I felt a real attachment to her even after a week. And I figured Miles would calm down. In my experience, even the most edgy child eventually gets tired of the routine. But Miles, as I came to discover, was not like most children.


	4. Fear and Lothing in Bly Manor

I never told you at the time, but I was starting to think he might’ve deserved to get expelled. The things he did were more than just strange, they were absolutely over the line in every way. Deliberately. In a manner that seemed calculated.

It started relatively small. I was making a late-night trip to the bathroom for water and Miles stopped me in the hallway. Well, he didn’t stop me but his stare did. He was staring directly at me, at my breasts in particular. I wasn’t wearing a bra under my T-shirt - normal behavior, for the middle of the night. But under his stare I crossed my arms. “Excuse me,” I said.

“Not a crime to look,” he said.

I hurried past him back to my room and shut the door. Weird. And weird on purpose. That weekend, I went into town and got a bathrobe. Future situations averted.

But that very night was the next time something odd happened. Or maybe Sunday morning. I was asleep, so I’m not sure exactly when. I just know something startled me awake. Abruptly, out of nowhere, I opened my eyes expecting to find something. And I did. Miles, standing by my window, looking at me. The moonlight made it look as though a ghostly figure was standing with him, a hand on his shoulder. The man I’d seen before, outlined in the window.

I startled, shooting upright, and Miles didn’t move. On second look, the incorporeal hand was gone, or maybe it had never been there at all.

That was the least of my concerns. I think I demanded to know what Miles was doing. He had no answer, his face was mostly hidden by his hair, and he left when I told him to. Shaken, I locked the door behind him, and then after a moment, went through to Fiona’s room and locked her door to the hallway as well. She needed to get to me if something went wrong, yes, but there was no reason I had to put up with this behavior from Miles. I slept with the doors locked, after that.

Then there was the concern of the ghosts I kept thinking I saw. Or just one, actually. The same one. A man, the one I saw on my late night exploration and then in my room with Miles. I began to recognize his face specifically.

I wasn’t really scared because I figured I had to be inventing him. Some specter that kept appearing more clearly the more often I pictured him. But the thing that ruined that theory was how, sometimes, when they didn’t know I was looking, the children seemed aware of him too. Was it just my imagination, telling me Flora was tense when I felt observed? It had to be. Was I making it up, how Miles never went the places I saw the spirit most? A certain part of the garden, that last bedroom on the end of that hall, the hallway leading from the dining room out to the back yard. Surely, I was. I tried to ask him, but he just told me in quite impolite terms what exactly I could do with my questions. Miles was a terror, afraid of nothing.

He’d gotten worse since I began locking the door at night, too. His passion for music, spoken of by Mrs. Grose in such loving detail, manifested in loud, late-night sessions of squealing electric guitar or rock music blaring from his speakers. Of course, she never heard it - her quarters were on the other side of the house, but his room was just down the hall from me so I was treated incessant noise, whenever he felt like it.

At one point, after three straight nights of cacophony I’d had enough. I got out of bed, put on my robe, and stomped toward his door. Of course I saw the spirit on my way to his room, a figment of my exhausted mind. Somehow, in the moment it all made sense. Miles was orchestrating my sleeplessness, messing with my mind, and trying to scare me into leaving. I just couldn’t figured out why.

I opened his door. “Do you know what time it is?” I said. Well, I was probably snapping. I was so frustrated I could cry.

Miles, when he saw me, smiled. “No,” he lied boldly, and played another loud riff.

Without thinking, I ripped the cord of the amplifier from the socket, but that didn’t stop him. He got up, and went to his drum set and started whacking away. Even louder.

At the end of my rope, I yelled for him to stop over the sound. He ignored me, so I reached over the cymbal for a drumstick, to take it.  
I didn’t see it but he must’ve shoved me because I went flying backwards. I hit the opposite wall hard, banged my elbow and head. That was the only reason I saw the shadowy man standing behind Miles again. I was sure of it. And Miles, who had had taunted me into this situation and then shoved me, was now looking at me with something a lot like surprise.

Small comfort. If I was at my best, I’d try to address the situation in the moment, to express my boundaries. But I was far from my best. I fled. I locked the door behind me and wrapped myself up in my blankets and wished desperately for some Tylenol.

Miles didn’t make a sound for the rest of the night. I didn’t sleep much anyways.

It sounds bad. It was bad. I’m sorry I kept it from you. But I knew if I told you all of this, you’d come and physically remove me from the house. This reign of terror was only for a couple of confusing weeks. By the time I could explain what was happening, I didn’t want to because I knew I’d never leave Bly Manor. At least, not without them.

I don’t want to hurry his redemption, though. The day after that night was excruciating, because he was ruder than ever. Before, he’d contained himself to only provoking me in private. That day, he was downright mean at breakfast. “You look tired,” he said disparagingly. “And old.”

“Oh, come now,” Mrs. Grose said, but she wasn’t really bothered.

“She is old,” Flora said. She didn’t mean anything by it, of course, but I was so through with EVERYTHING that I almost cried. Instead I kept it together. I didn’t reply, finished breakfast calmly, and told Flora she had then morning off to play with her brother. Then I excused myself to my room. And then I cried.

This was awful! I was seriously doubting everything I thought I was good at, even things I was experiencing with my own senses. I thought this was going to be a dream job, and instead it was in the running for the worst month in my life. The self pity was strong, it lasted a while.

I wasn’t nearly done when there was a knock on my door. Miles let himself in before I said anything. “The point of knocking,” I said with all the annoyance I had, “is to wait for permission to enter.”

“Well,” he said. “Should I go back out?”

“No,” I answered. No point. “It’s fine. What do you need?”

Miles came closer, sat on the edge of my bed next to me. “I didn’t mean to,” he said. “Last night.”

“Alright,” I said, with restraint that I found admirable.

I readied myself for more excuses, more minimizing, but that wasn’t what happened. Instead, he leaned in and attempted to kiss me.

As a reminder, he was sixteen.

I reacted in the most rational manner I could manage at the time, and promptly and without hesitation shoved him off the bed. He went flying in a sprawl of lanky limbs - lighter than I’d imagined. Maybe I’d pushed too hard. Then I heard muffled cursing from the floor. He was fine.

“What are you doing?” I demanded.

Miles looked at me through his hair. “Trying to make it up to you.”

“That’s insane, that’s not how you make things up to people!”

His face reddened and he struggled to his feet. “Oh, then I guess I’m just crazy,” he said in a rush, “and that wasn’t exactly what Quint told me to do. Sure. Whatever.” And he left in a huff, slamming my door shut behind himself.

And, okay. He was making every effort to alienate me and shock me and scare me, but the thing that struck me about that particular comment was how it didn’t seem contrived at all.

Quint. I still didn’t know much about him. Flora refused to talk about him, and any time she did she’d clam up the moment she realized what she was doing. Miles had said his name exactly twice. With the letters before, and now.

And that’s when I thought of a third possibility, regarding Miles’ expulsion. Maybe he’d been taught that kind of behavior, taught it was normal. Rewarded, even, when he performed as directed. Manipulated by a bad actor, an adult who certainly knew better.

That felt like a stretch, though. Their uncle was negligent, yes, but not totally stupid. He wouldn’t hire someone dangerous to work with them. Mrs. Grose wouldn’t let it happen without comment, not the way she revered the children. It just didn’t seem possible.

But in another way, it was the most plausible explanation for what was happening. What other explanation was there? Not ghosts, as I’d let myself fear in moments of terror. And not any sort of innate wickedness. Children aren’t just cruel, and Miles was no psychopath. He loved Flora too honestly for that to be an act.

I needed to know more about Quint, about the circumstances of his exit. Mrs. Grose was the only person who could’ve had answers. I went to her that day, after dinner, when the kids were upstairs watching TV in Miles’ room.

This post is getting long, though, so you’ll have to wait for the rest of that. Another cliffhanger, sorry!


	5. Or, Fear and Loathing Pt 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> tw for brief inappropriate pseudo-sexual behavior from a kid

Picking back up where we left off…

So Mrs. Grose. I accepted her offer of a cup of tea and let her guide the conversation for a while. She wanted to talk about Flora’s passion for French, and the plans she was making for Thanksgiving. As gently as I could, I steered the conversation around to what they did for the holidays last year, what Quint had asked for. And then, after a casual sip of tea, I inquired about the manner of his leaving.

Mrs. Grose was just SO sorry to tell me Quint had died, and rather suddenly. An accident on a walk, she said, and didn’t feel comfortable elaborating further.

“The children seem nervous to discuss him,” I pointed out. “Any idea why?”

“Well, I imagine they’re still loyal to him,” she said.

I found that hard to believe, with the little I knew about him. “Oh, I see,” I said pleasantly. “I’ve noticed something else, though.”

After a moment, Mrs. Grose couldn’t help herself from asking what that might’ve been. I was getting the impression she thought of herself as quite the fount of information. She liked to know and not share. So I figured I’d indulge her, and try and get something in return.

“I’ve noticed,” I told her, nothing but innocent, “that the children have some bad habits, they seem to have learned from someone else. Some… foul language, for example. I can’t imagine they learned it from you.”

That would be Quint’s influence, she informed me, and then told me about how she never liked him. Too rough, uncultured, and too entitled to the “luxuries that came with this station” which was the most pretentious thing I’d ever heard. And then she went on to the real disturbing shit, which was made more disturbing by how normal she seemed to think it was.

She kept listing behaviors and my stomach started churning. Quint, letting Miles get drunk. Quint, neglecting Flora’s studies, Quint, disappearing with Miles for hours on end. “He really had his way with them,” she finished, “but there was nothing I could do.”

I pretended to understand, nodded along cheerfully and tamped everything else down. And then, after I spoke to her, I went to find the kids. They were in Miles’ room, watching the television, curled up together in his bed. I knocked on the doorframe, peeked in at the screen. It was something animated that I didn’t recognize.

“Hi,” Flora said.

“What are you watching?” I asked from the doorway.

“Ferngully,” Flora answered in a small voice.

“Cool. Can I watch with you?”

I could feel them almost holding their breath, tense. “Sure,” Miles answered after a moment. “If you want.”

“I do,” I agreed, and Flora scooted closer to Miles to make room for me. They seemed to be waiting for me to do something, so I was careful to hold still and do nothing. The movie was cute, age appropriate. I didn’t need to pay such close attention, except I still could feel them looking at me. Glancing over every few seconds. Waiting for something.

After maybe ten minutes in, they relaxed. Stopped paying attention to everything about me, and returned attention to the movie. And then after another long while, Flora tipped her head against my shoulder. I waited several beats before slowly adjusting my position, moving my arm around her shoulders. Victory.

I thought I might get Miles too, but he recoiled from my touch with a flinch. Which was more than a little odd, given how he’d attempted to KISS ME earlier that day, but I chose to think of it as progress. Closer to normal behavior.

As credits rolled, I looked over and found Flora asleep. I smiled at her cute little face, and began the process of trying to pick her up without waking her up. Miles watched me, closely. But this time, when I caught him looking, he didn’t look away.

“I’m not going to hurt her,” I said on a hunch.

Miles didn’t react, other than blinking at me. When I got up with Flora, though, he followed me and got doors for me. I was more than a little nervous with him back in our rooms, I have to admit. But Miles kept his distance from me and remained quiet, as I got Flora into bed. He seemed sort of far away mentally too, thinking about something else.

“You know I lock these doors?” I asked him, though I couldn’t tell you why.

“Yeah,” he said. For a moment, I would’ve sworn he was about to apologize. Instead he left, shutting Flora’s door behind himself.

I did lock the doors tonight as well. But I thought, briefly, about not doing so, even though that made me feel insane. It’s just, if I was right about something going on with Quint, if Miles wasn’t acting out but rather acting as he was taught, that was something to pity. He had to feel so alone.

That was the problem of another day. That night, I got an astoundingly good night of sleep. And when I woke up, I had a plan nearly fully formed for what to do.

It began with skipping breakfast. I went to Miles’ room instead. He was playing around on one of his guitars, unplugged, though at my knock he stopped - unusual respect, for him. “I thought those had to be plugged in,” I said, trying to make a joke.

Miles twitched a shoulder. “Well it helps,” he said. “Since the guitar isn’t even the most important part of how it sounds.”

“What do you mean?”

At first, it seemed like he thought I was playing some sort of trick on him. He looked at me suspiciously. “Pedals and amps are part of the sound, too,” he said, with resentment.

“I didn’t know that,” I said, keeping my tone carefully light. “How does that work?”

Miles thought this was a trap. He started vaguely. But as I asked more questions, he began to open up and reveal the depth of his knowledge. He pointed at them as he told me what they did, the DS-1 and DS-2 and Neo Clone pedals and his Fender amp and how they all connected and what they did to the sound in different combinations. It was surprisingly technical. He demonstrated what changing the settings would do, and then he plugged everything in and played something while I twisted knobs on the amp so I could see what that did, too.

I think I said something kind of stupid at the end, said it was cool he knew all of this. Not sure exactly, but I remember how his look of condescension had some sympathy in it. And before I ruined the moment any more, I decided to say what I came here to say.

“Miles,” I said, and had his full attention. “What do you want? Do you want me to find you another boarding school? Because I could.”

“You’re done trying to teach me?” he said, an edge of wild contempt in his voice.

“No. But I’m not gonna force it. If you’d be happier somewhere else, I want you to be there.” I paid close attention to how that affected him. Judging from his face, he still thought there was another shoe to drop, so I tried to explain better. “Look. We’ve spent a couple weeks like this. You’ve proven you can make my life miserable, if you want to, okay? Mission accomplished.”

This made him smile a little, exhale something that might’ve been a laugh.

“But I don’t want us to do that. And even with everything with your old school - I don’t want you to be unhappy. I’m here to advocate for you. That’s why I asked for your side of the story.”

“Since when is that part of tutoring?” he asked. A question that caught my attention.

Since I came here and found them adrift, with only Mrs. Grose as a constant, but that seemed like a lot to drop on a teenager. “Since always, for me. I won’t be upset. Please, just. Tell me what you want.”

He pressed his lips together, worried at his bottom lip with his teeth. “I want to stay,” he finally said, a breathless sort of confession. “I want to be with Flora.”

“Okay. Then we have to work together.”

There was the catch; I saw him draw back, openness fading from his face. “How?”

“Honesty,” I said. “Be honest with me, and I’ll be honest with you.”

That was opening myself up for him to challenge that, I was well aware. Usually, saying something like that would invite a question, something they thought they knew the answer to. But I could’ve never predicted what he asked me.

“Do you think the school was right?”

I frowned. “To expel you?”

“That I’m a bad person. A pervert or whatever.”

The thoughts I managed to have were relatively simple. I think I could best sum them up as: oh no. All of the things I suspected, the worst-case scenarios, they were feeling increasingly likely. “No,” I said. “I don’t think you’re a bad person.”

“Even though I tried to… like. With you.”

“Will you do it again? Now that you know you shouldn't?”

He shook his head, tucked his hair behind his ear. “No,” he said. I could feel how desperate he was to be believed in my gut.

“Then that’s all I need to hear,” I said, and stood up. “Come on, let’s get you some food, and then we’ll put together your curriculum for the rest of the year. I think we could count your explanation of this guitar set-up as the science lesson of the day.”

Miles was very skeptical about being allies even now. He maintained pointed distance from me on the way downstairs and was NOT more friendly than normal. When I asked him questions, his favorite thing to say in response was, “Whatever.” But when I made a decision for him, he delighted in contradicting me. Demanding we read a book I didn’t include in the reading list, telling me he already knew algebra when I put it on our agenda for the fall. I didn’t take it personally. It wasn’t about me. It was, in his own way, honesty. And things got easier after that.


	6. Wool

I can almost hear you demanding to know more about the apparition - I know, I kind of ignored that part for a while. In my defense, I really thought it was just exhaustion, and the way you attach faces to the things you see in the dark. A reasonable conclusion, like almost a hundred percent of the time. Even reasonable then. I was sure it was over. I got sleep, and the children and I were having productive days, and life was generally good.

But then, around a week later, I saw the ghost man again. We were walking outside, just me and Flora, when I saw a shimmer under one of the trees, felt a glare I was too familiar with. The thing is, though, Flora paused slightly before I paused. She saw it too, I was sure. So I made a point of needing to tie my shoe, to see what she would do when she thought I wasn’t paying attention.

Flora waited until she was sure I wasn’t looking, and then she waved at the ghost. Or rather, she shooed him away. When I straightened up again, the incorporeal figure had disappeared.

The thing I was starting to truly fear was that whatever I thought I saw, the children were seeing more. Remember when we went to IT together? Like that. The idea of supernatural things focusing on children, on the kids seeing things I couldn’t, that’s what was stuck in my head. I’d see Miles catch the eye of something in a mirror and follow his gaze just to catch the barest hint of motion. Or Flora would go frozen, as cold draft blew through the room, but I couldn’t find anything to pin the draft on. There was something I was missing, the edges of it sometimes just visible, but whatever it was, it continued to operate just out of sight.

Miles’ hair was getting longer as the weeks passed, and Flora’s too. The house was old, and poorly insulated - as summer faded and things got colder, the children piled on sweaters and socks on and didn’t complain. But I guess they had always lived here, so they were used to it.

I wasn’t the least bit prepared, though. By early October, the chill settled in. It seeped into every piece of me. My toes were numb for a week, even when I layered socks. But I suppose my socks weren’t made for New England winters.

“Why are you twitchy?” Flora asked loudly one afternoon, when I was trying to get her through a cursive writing lesson. “Your letters are all wiggly.”

I was shivering. But I didn’t want her to say that because I could already feel Miles looking up from across the room, and I didn’t want to jeopardize our shaky friendship by showing weakness. “Penmanship wasn’t my best subject,” I said. “You’re way better. Fill out pages twenty and twenty-one.” While she did, I sat on my hands to warm them up.

Once we finished for the day I went upstairs to try and layer the cold away. We’d gotten in a habit of hanging out in the conservatory until dinner, and I didn’t want to lose any time with them so I was hurrying. They were beginning to really relax around me. Any amount of chilliness was worth it.

I was digging through my closet when I felt someone behind me. Before I could turn, Miles spoke. “The door was open.”

“That doesn’t mean you get to sneak up on people,” I said, trying to sound light. I think the audible click of my teeth chattering together ruined that effect.

He looked at me with those indecipherably hard eyes of his, so dark as to be unreadable, and then said abruptly, “Follow me.”

A few weeks ago I might’ve refused. But I did follow him at a bit of a distance. We went down the hallway I’d ventured through on my second night here, the night I first saw whatever figment of my imagination I kept seeing. I’d avoided it since, though I couldn’t say exactly why, and I’d never found the children down here either. “Was this part of the house ever used?” I asked.

“Yeah. When my parents were alive,” he answered, and took me into a room. Not the last on the left, but the second to last. A room that had been converted into the largest closet I’d ever seen. Miles opened a set of doors, looking for something, and then another.

“I’m sorry,” I said. Which was dumb, and not enough. “How old were you?”

“When they died? I was twelve.”

I knew by now his tone meant basically nothing. He always sounded annoyed with me. I’d started to hope that was just age-appropriate, but teenagers weren’t really my specialty. “If I ask you what it was like, would you tell me?” I asked.

“Here,” he said, and pointed at an entire shelf, floor-to-ceiling, filled with sweaters. “Take some of these.”

“Oh, I don’t need clothes,” I started to protest.

Miles reached out to me, startlingly fast. He closed a hand around my wrist just long enough for me to feel warmth - and more to the point, for him to feel how cold I was. “Come on,” he said. “No one’s even using them. And they probably belong to me anyways. Or Flora, and she’d want you to have them too.”

With a feeling of doing something wrong, I stepped closer to start looking through the stacks. There was a positive rainbow of options, striped and patterned and cable knit. One or two looked familiar. I thought I’d seen Miles in them before.

“Stop,” Miles said, so loud I winced. “Don’t touch that one.”

“Don’t yell at me,” I told him, but I took a step back and let him remove the offending sweater. Thick red stripes and baggy sleeves. “Why? What’s wrong with that one?”

“Nothing.”

“Miles. Honesty.” I hadn’t used this particular leverage yet, reserving it for important moments. For whatever reason, this felt like the time.

It worked. He looked at me resentfully, but he looked, and he listened. “Quint liked this one,” he finally said very quiet. “It’s not supposed to be in here, Grose must’ve put it in here on accident.”

"Okay," I said trying not to sound like my mind was racing. I stuck to facts. Quint wore his parents clothes, too. Miles didn't want me touching them. "Did," I began, and then hesitated.

Miles removed a couple other sweaters from the stack, shoved all of them in the back of a bottom empty cabinet and crossed his arms. “There’s wool socks somewhere in here too,” he said. “Mom had like a million pairs.”

“Are you sure-” I began to ask.

He cut me off. “It sucked,” he said. “When they died. Flora didn’t really get it.”

Without thinking, I went to put a hand on his shoulder. Miles winced, slipped away from me. “Sorry,” I said, resolutely not offended. “That must’ve been hard.”

“It was fine,” he said, a lie, and then clarified. I let myself think it was because of our agreement. “I try not to think about it.”

“If you want to, I’m here to listen.”

Miles just rolled his eyes. “Nice,” he said. “Casual, I didn’t even notice.”

“Okay, smart aleck,” I frowned, and he snorted. It was light, we were connecting. But as I piled up pairs of socks to borrow, I noticed him go still again. He tried to pretend nothing was wrong, I only caught the end of an expression but I could still tell what it meant. He’d seen something, I hadn’t. And for the rest of the night he was sullen.


	7. The Man in the Moon

I’m sure you remember our conversation last year, only a week or so before Halloween, where you started by telling me I was exaggerating the amount this house was haunted for dramatic effect and ended by telling me I was in danger.

“People don’t see ghosts! Especially not the same one for THREE GODDAMN MONTHS!” you said, with more emphasis than I can convey. I think I defended myself weakly, said something about the fact that I’d gone to a tarot reader that one time and in general was more of a believer in that sort of thing so I’d figured I was making it up. I just remember your reply vividly. “I don’t care if you believe in the Easter Bunny. You don’t have visions of him glaring at you and threatening kids!”

That was sort of the crux of the matter. It changed everything. Gave me permission to trust that I was understanding what was happening. I watched Flora ignore the spirit in the corner of a room, watched Miles retreat into himself under the supernatural supervision, and I formulated a plan.

It began at dinner one day. “I have a question,” I began, and the kids looked at me. “Are there any stories about this house being haunted?”

Miles went pale, and Flora bit her lip. Mrs. Grose was the one who spoke, assuring me there were no such tales. Innocently, I asked again, this time the children in particular. Had they ever seen anything? Flora lied, she said she hadn’t, but Miles said nothing.

Notable. Interesting.

I was in the shower that night when there was a knock on the door. “I’m in here,” I called, and heard nothing further. So I finished my shower and got out, wrapping the towel around me. Then there was another knock, and I frowned. “One second.” I pulled on my underwear and sleep pants, yanked a T-shirt over my head and opened the door a crack. It was Miles, waiting out in the hall.

“Everything okay?”

“Can I come in?” he asked. He sounded strange.

It was a testament to how our relationship had progressed that I let him in. He averted his eyes without needing to be asked while I pulled my sweatshirt on, and leaned against the door with his arms crossed again. “Were you waiting out there?” I said with a frown.

“I need to talk to you,” he answered, and then proceeded to say exactly nothing.

At first, I figured it was dramatics. I toweled my hair off while I waited, so it would stop dripping down my back. “And the bathroom is the place this had to happen?” I finally asked, to prompt him.

“Nobody can hear us in here,” he said, reluctant and hating to explain.

So it wasn’t just in my head, I remember thinking victoriously. We were being observed. “Tell me what I need to know,” I said, and I have to say, I felt so relieved at the prospect of a mission that I almost felt guilty.

It was also what he needed to hear. Miles took a deep breath, then let it out unevenly. “Don’t ask about ghosts,” he said. “Don’t look right at him either. It makes him more real.”

“Really?”

He nodded. “You looked at him when you were in my room that night, and he pushed you.”

“He pushed me,” I repeated. It would explain how I hadn’t seen Miles doing it.

It must’ve sounded like skepticism, because Miles reacted defensively. “I’m not making this shit up,” he said sharply.

“I don’t think you are,” I assured him. “You’re not a liar. You’ve kept your side of our deal.” It settled him, to hear that. He gave a single jerky nod, and still I saw nerves in every part of him, a tremble in his lip. Had he trusted anyone since his parents died? It seemed increasingly unlikely. “I’m just thinking about how to protect you,” I added then.

“You can’t,” he said. His voice cracked.

“Oh, because you know everything? Have you dealt with many hauntings?”

Miles glared at me. “I know we had another tutor in the summer and he scared her off in a month.”

“Well, it’s been more than a month,” I began.

“Yeah, ‘cause he thinks I don’t like you so you’re safe,” Miles snapped.

I remember the moment after that feeling tender. A bruise poked and then avoided. He’d confessed to something, and now he couldn’t look at me. “I see,” I finally said. My heart was… I don’t even know the words. He’d flee if I tried to address it, so I changed the subject.

“Is it the house?”

“What do you mean?”

“Is it haunting the house, or did it come with you to school?”

Miles shook his head. “I don’t know. Both, a little bit. Mostly here, but I saw him at school a couple times. And he’s probably watching now, so I should go.”

“Is he always watching?”

He didn’t know. He was trembling, avoiding my gaze again. He didn’t know, and he’d lived in fear since the man died. “I should go,” he said again. But since he didn’t, he needed something.

I put my hand on his arm, moving slowly to let him avoid me if he wanted to. “Would you let me give you a hug?” I asked, prepared to be shut down quite firmly.

Miles didn’t move. He opened his mouth, and then shut it again. After another moment of paralyzed indecision, he nodded. Just once. So I pulled him in, held him firmly and mentally counted to ten. I only got to eight when he squirmed away. “Leave me alone,” he said, and then threw me a bone. “Unless I tell you.”

This plan was less than ideal, but it’s what I had right then. “Okay,” I said, and he left, slamming the door behind him.

Later that night, as I was tucking Flora in, she had a question. “Do you think the moon can see us?”

“The moon,” I repeated curiously.

“Yeah. There’s a man in the moon, y’know.”

This felt dangerous. “I’m aware,” I said. “Do you feel him watching you?”

Flora nodded.

“Do you see him during the day?” I asked, on a hunch that we might be able to connect the dots this way.

“Sometimes,” she said.

“Well,” I said. “He’s boring. We don’t need to pay any attention to him.”

“Oh,” Flora said after a second, and then she sighed deeply. “Okay. I didn’t know if anybody else saw him. Miles always says he doesn’t.”

Oh, my heart was breaking again. “I see him,” I assure her softly. “But we’ve got to do a really good job pretending not to. Can you handle it?”

Flora nodded again, importantly, and allowed herself to be put to bed after that. I wished her goodnight as I turned out the light. “Goodnight, love you!” she said. And I couldn’t help but echo it back.

I loved both of them. Too much to abandon them to whatever was happening here. So, that meant my only real option was dealing with it head on.


	8. Head On (Ish)

It was difficult to have to pretend to dislike one of my students. Especially for an unseen audience. I tried to follow Miles’ lead, for the most part. And, for the most part, he ignored me. He did his work silently, did it well. The only noticeable change in him after our talk in the bathroom was how he wouldn’t go off on his own after he’d finished schoolwork for the day. He’d stay near me, curled up in the same room a chair with a book or listening to records. And that meant I saw him see the ghost a lot more often.

I knew Flora’s reactions in and out by then. If she looked at me with a certain solemn expression, I’d know she was deliberately ignoring the spirit and I’d do everything I could do keep her attention. And she’d always look at me, now that it was our secret. We had trust. It wasn’t her I was worried about.

Miles was a bit of another story. He was so quiet that it took a while, for me to see the form his reactions took. Not movement, no acknowledgement to me like his sister. Miles seemed determined to suffer alone. He’d notice the faint figure before anyone else, and the only sign would be a curling up. I started to notice him with his knees held to his chest or arms clenched around himself. He’d fall asleep like that, in a tight little ball wherever he was.

It didn’t make a ton of sense to me, until I noticed that the ghost would venture much closer to him than to anyone else. I thought of being shoved across the room and then remembered, with a second of belated adrenaline, the vision of the man with his hand on Miles’ shoulder in my room. Oh, I thought. Oh shit.

I was up half that night thinking about it. If ghosts were real, then they were governed by rules. Maybe they were rules I’d hear of before - iron and salt and crosses. Or maybe there were totally new rules. I needed to start to experiment somehow, in some way that wouldn’t give up the whole game immediately.

Of course, once I started thinking that way, there were certain other inescapable facts. Using ghost story logic, that meant Miles and the ghost had some sort of connection in real life. And like, no prize for guessing. It was pretty clear who that would be. You’ve probably been screaming that at me for the last three posts. Look, it was harder to be in the middle of it. That’s all I can say on my own behalf, though. I should’ve seen it sooner.

I began to sense patterns. I passed the spirit on the stairs most often; or there’s where I noticed him, anyways. It seemed something kept him from my room, save that time I saw him with Miles. Flora testified to the same; she never saw the ghost in her room. Alright, that seemed all well and good. But it wasn’t like we could just continue with our lives while Miles took the brunt of the haunting. That wouldn’t work.

There was only one reasonable course of action. One weekend, I took the children on a trip to the nearest bookstore, and picked up the significant order I placed before, over the phone. They were in bags already, so the kids didn’t really see what I got. They were too excited about their various new acquisitions, which was a welcome distraction. I hadn’t seen them happy often enough.

Miles let us be friendly, out here. He tapped my arm to show me something, poked me with a book until I took it, stuck closer than ever while Flora ran up and down aisles. I didn’t know if this type of thing as normal behavior for him, but it worried me. Did he want to be like this all the time? I hoped not. That would just add a new dimension of tragedy. So I didn’t ask.

Flora wanted to tell me the title of every book she’d seen, so I listened as we began the walk back to the car. Pleasantly, Miles ignored her in favor of reading as he walked. He almost walked in front of a car. I had to grab him by the shoulder to stop him, and expected him to shake me off quickly.

Miles didn’t, though. “Can we go somewhere else?” he asked, eyes still on the book. “For lunch.”

I looked at Flora. “What do you think?” I asked, squeezing her hand to get her attention. “You want to get some lunch?”

“Yes,” she said. “Please?”

So we got lunch out at a place around the corner. It was a bright moment in the middle of everything. It made me more determined to fix things, to let this be normal for them. Them talking over each other, telling me about different places nearby that they’d liked to go before, about the books they got and pestering me for desert. It was almost physically painful to get back and feel them closing off again.

That’s what my books were for, though. So, as I helped the two Fairchilds stay on course with their autumn studies, I began some studying of my own. See, those bags were full of every book I could find on ghost hunting. Ways to stop them, contain them, protect against them, and get rid of them.

Miles noticed what I was reading a few days later, when we were sharing a couch reading. “Whoa,” he said, and reached out to lift my book to get a better view of the title - Ghost-Hunting Do’s and Don’t’s. “What’s this?”

“I said I was going to protect you,” I said without looking at him.

He didn’t say anything in response. A few minutes later, I saw a telltale glow in the mirror, our supernatural watcher. Miles got up then, and moved to the other couch.

That made sense. He’d probably avoid me for a while. So be it. I continued reading.

That night, I went to bed as usual, tucking Flora in and then reading for a while. I turned my light off and went to sleep around midnight. Of course, because I’m detailing all of this I’m sure you could gather that something happened - I won’t be able to express how much of a surprise it was for Miles to rouse me with a whisper of my name. I woke up with a start, and didn’t know what I was seeing exactly. He had one leg up on the side of the bed, kneeling in to reach me, and his hair was tied up in a bun. I hardly recognized his face, now that I could see all of it. And I didn’t realize until just then that I couldn’t remember when I stopped locking my door, but I hadn’t locked it for weeks.

“Hi,” I said, still half asleep.

“Can I sit here?” he asked.

“In my bed?”

He nodded, and I made some sort of vague noise of affirmation. I was more confused than anything else, not alarmed. Miles scooted all the way on the bed and sat back against the headboard. I turned onto my back and rubbed my eyes, waking up more by the moment. “He won’t come in here?” I asked.

Miles shook his head and pulled his knees up to his chest to rest his arms on them. He began picking at the skin around his thumbnail, an anxious sound, loud in the dark room. “Doesn’t like the newer rooms,” he said.

“It’s Quint, isn’t it?” I said, too tired to think better of asking.

Maybe he was tired too. “Yeah,” he said. The word sat heavily between us on the bed. “But I can’t just run. He’ll follow.”

“Okay.” It was a little confusing, the way he’d try to preempt arguments he’d thought I’d make. He was smart, that’s what that told me. Smart and feeling trapped. I pulled myself up, then, propped up on one arm, and forced myself to really snap into wakefulness. I was awake, I willed it to be so. “Did something happen?”

Miles moved his head, a twitch more than a nod or a shake of the head, his mouth a thin line. “You really want to kill him?” he asked. “Again?”

“Again? Was he killed the first time?” I turned to look at him.

Moonlight showed me part of his face, highlighting his brow and the bridge of his nose. “I was supposed to go on that walk with him,” Miles said. “We always went on walks together. If I was there.”

I'm not sure exactly what I said to that, I just remember how helpless I felt in the moment. He was convinced it was his fault that this man died, and he'd decided this was his penance, this haunting. I didn't have the words to convince him he was wrong that night, but I let him sit with me as long as he wanted.

"Do you miss him?" I asked at some point.

Miles said something like yes, or maybe he just nodded. I remember more clearly what came next. "But not, like. Not like he was a good person," he said, a reluctant acknowledgement of some fact. A fact I didn't know, though.

"How do you mean?"

"What, Grose hasn't told you how much she didn't like him already?"

She had, and we both knew it. "I want your side of the story," I said, like I'd said before.

Miles didn’t answer, and he left soon after that.


	9. I’m on the hunt, I’m after you.

Ghost hunting was really boring, in the end. There was a lot of reading to do, a lot of note-taking. Lots of late nights in bed, copying relevant information into the notebook I started carrying everywhere. And I began to put some dots together.

The ghost didn’t like newer rooms, Miles had said. Didn’t like the bathroom. It took me tracking down an old copy of the paper with Quint’s obituary in it to make that make sense - he’d slipped and fallen in the rain. There were pipes in the walls of the rooms that had been renovated most recently, I heard the swish of water every time the toilet flushed. Water kept Quint away. That was something.

Unfortunately, not much else was cut and dry. Hunting a ghost? Plenty of tips to try. But if someone had already found one, the books didn’t seem to have many options after that point.

Warding ghosts off with sage or salt was the default advice. I purchased large quantities of both, filled the spice rack with sage and stashed a container of salt in most of the rooms we hung out in, but using it would be a dead giveaway. That would have to wait.

Then there was the whole goal of killing him. Turned out, that wasn’t realistic. Getting rid of a ghost is less murder and more dismissal, from everything I read. Miles did seem to have figured out one true thing - ignoring ghosts was a primary method of weakening them. Dismissing them altogether was half therapy and half exorcism. And since I had less than zero interest in helping this ghost finish his business, that meant half our options were out of the question.

I was waiting for the right moment to fill Miles in on all of this. And then, one stormy afternoon, I had an idea. After lunch, when Flora was busy with a French lesson, I asked Miles to follow me into the sun porch. We’d stayed out of here since things got cold. But now, with the rain beating on the skylights and floor-to-ceiling windows, it felt like the safest place in the house.

Miles listened to me with crossed arms. We were standing right next to one of the windows, the sounds of the rain nearly drowning out my words. “So I’m doomed,” he said.

“No,” I said. “Opposite of that. You’re the only one who can do something about this.”

“What do you mean?”

“He’s haunting you. That means how you feel makes a difference.”  
I meant that to be hopeful, but Miles screwed up his mouth miserably. “Great,” he said. “So I’m keeping him alive by being psycho.”

“Did I say that?” I asked.

Miles sighed. “No.”

“So why did you?” I asked, and it struck me that this was probably the opening I’d get to bring up what I’d been waiting to ask him about. “Miles. Mrs. Grose said some things about Quint that really worried me.”

“Like what?” he said flatly, fidget with his sweater sleeves.

I used the least objectionable example as a test balloon. “She said Quint let you drink a lot.”

“That’s nothing,” Miles said. “Wait till you hear what else he did.”

“Does that mean you’ll tell me?”

He looked out the window, his mind working. “I’m sure you’ve figured it out,” he finally said. “You work with kids all the time, right. It’s not like you’ve never met one who was molested before.”

Well, there it was. Not exactly unexpected. The norm-breaking behavior from Quint was a real red flag. Classic grooming. And the strange way Miles was acting, too mature, and the stuff that got him expelled. Yeah. I’d had my suspicions for a while. So you’ll have to forgive me for keeping this from you, Douglas, but I wanted to let Miles keep control of his story, let him be the one to say it first, even here. It’s one of the only things he’s got.

“Nope,” I answered him honestly. “You’re not the first.”

He looked at me in glances, furtive and nervous. He had to clear his throat before talking. “Do you still want to protect me?”

“Yes, Miles, always,” I said, knowing I couldn’t hope to sound like I meant it as much as I truly did.

“Don’t you want to know more before you say that?” he asked, obviously dreading the answer.

“No. Hey.” He met my eyes. “I promised to be honest too. That was our whole deal. Yes?”

“Yeah.”

If he didn’t believe me, this wouldn’t mean shit. But now was the time to try it. “It doesn’t matter. Any of the details. I’m on your side, I’m here for you, I’m listening. And we are going to get rid of him, whatever it takes. I have one idea I think you’ll like.”

“What’s that?”

“I’d like you to take your guitar in here and play as loudly as you want, as long as you want today,” I said.

I watched his face light up, as much as he tried to squash it. “Why?” he asked.

“Because this is your house,” I said simply. And also he deserved to be heard, but I knew if I said that we’d get derailed by how enthusiastically he’d call me cheesy. “Come on, I’ll help you carry your stuff.”

The first chord came from the amp with nearly window-shattering volume. Mrs. Grose came running, and Flora. But where Flora was delighted, Mrs. Grose was decidedly less so. She seemed altogether very flustered, and quickly fled to a different part of the house.

“Good,” Flora said while Miles kept strumming away, a little more quietly now that Mrs. Grose was gone.

“Why don’t you like her?” I asked them, while we were hauling everything back up to his room. We would all need showers after this, especially little Flora who had Miles’ prized guitar hugged against her chest carefully as she climbed the steps.

“Why? Do we have to?” Miles answered dryly.

“She doesn’t like us,” Flora said.

“Really? Seems like she totally worships you to me,” I said neutrally.

“Am I missing something?”

Miles reached the top of the staircase and paused for a second to look back. “Yeah,” he said. “She only likes us if we pretend to be her perfect little angels, she doesn’t like actually us.” And Flora nodded emphatically.

“How long has she been here?”

“Forever,” Flora volunteered.

“Our uncle hired her,” Miles corrected her. “Like, right away.”

We brought all of his things back without incident, and I sent Flora to shower first. I went back to my room in the meantime, and just a few moments later, Miles joined me. “Hey,” he said, hesitating in my doorway.

“Yeah, come in.”

He entered and shut the door behind himself. “She knew, right?” he said, with no other context.

“Mrs. Grose?” I asked, and he nodded. I could’ve hedged my bets, I could’ve given her the benefit of the doubt. But I promised I’d tell him the truth, and the truth was, “I think so, yeah.”

That wasn’t a surprise to him. “Yeah,” he repeated, looking at the ground.

“She never said anything?”

Miles snorted, abruptly contemptuous. “No. Because then she’d have to acknowledge I’m not an altar boy.”

“Can I ask you a kind of stupid question?” I said after a second. “You really think your uncle doesn’t want to know about this? Maybe she’s wrong about that.”

He took a while to answer, and I started putting digging through my dresser. I actually think he might’ve wanted to wait for me not to be looking at him, before he answered. “She’s not wrong. I tried to tell him. He wouldn’t answer the phone. So I left a message telling him things were bad, and he never called me back.”

So that was the moment that I started to hate the man that hired me.

We talked about other things that night too, before Flora came back. Miles began the process of opening up to me, telling me a little more about his relationship with that man. That first night he was just testing the waters, seeing how I’d react. So I was just patient, and quiet, and I let him take the lead.

I know I stopped filling you in on a lot of this around now. This stuff with Miles, it isn’t the kind of thing I felt I could get into casually over the phone. Plus, I was so busy with my research on ghosts and other things, and their lessons, and spending quality time with them after our school days were over. I barely had any time to myself, let alone time to talk. I paid off my student loans, I did tell you that.

In my next post I’ll try to make my thought process make more sense.


	10. Find My Nest to Salt

Flora and I usually spent Saturday mornings in my bed, reading or her on her Gameboy, with the old radiator cranked all the way up and groaning in protest. The Saturday after Miles’ little concert, he knocked on my door and joined us.

“Hey,” I said in surprise.

“Hi.” He brought a mug of something; he set it down on the bedside table on the other side of the bed from me. “Can I…”

Of course he could, I answered immediately, and then asked him if he wasn’t afraid of Quint’s ghost anymore, but not in so many words. Flora still seemed mostly clueless, and Miles and I seemed to quietly agree to keep it that way. I think I said something like, “So you’re done pretending not to like me?”

“Well,” Miles said. “You’re not going to leave, right?”

“I’m not going anywhere,” I said.

Miles squeezed in next to Flora on the other side of the bed and had a sip from his mug - coffee, it smelled like. “Right,” he said. “So. Me neither.”

And just like that, that was the end of our ruse.

It didn’t seem like much of a difference at first. He still wasn’t a particularly loud or outgoing kid. In fact, I was getting the impression that his edgy act had been more unnatural than I’d known. His natural state seemed to be silence, though I did have to wonder how much of that came from him being surrounded by strangers since the age of thirteen. That had to have an effect on a developing mind.

That’s all beside the point, though, because Miles was quieter than ever but also fundamentally different. Being more himself meant being - honestly? - a little bit of a dork, without the put-upon sharp edges. Awkwardly sincere and the kind of bracingly honest that only the young can pull off. And now he was on my side, the same way I was on his. The three of us, him and me and Flora, were a team.

Like, for example. Mrs. Grose had been running the household while I was here - planning the meals, handling the cleaners, handling utilities. Overall, making the decisions. I’d gone along with it out of the sense that this is how things were. No need to rock the boat, and our civil relationship wasn’t exactly the most secure.

So, when the topic of Thanksgiving came up again, a week or so out, and I asked if we could have something my family usually makes, I didn’t expect much. I wanted that mac and cheese with bread crumbs you love so much. It seemed that wasn’t going to happen, though. Mrs. Grose hemmed and hawed and said something about this being too last-minute. And I assumed that was it, like it had been that first night. Bacon sandwiches and applesauce, and no room for debate.

I hadn’t noticed Miles lifting his head. “Hey,” he said then. “No. Let’s make it.”

“I’d love to,” Mrs. Grose said, a lie. “It’s just-”

“We’re rich, right?” Miles said, his tone insolent and flat. “I don’t understand why mac and cheese is impossible.”

“I love mac and cheese,” Flora volunteered, and then shot me an angelic little smile. “I think it’s a really good idea.”

And I took the chance to twist the knife. “If it’s not too much trouble, I think it’d be a great addition.” And Mrs. Grose didn’t have much choice in the matter after that.

Little things like that. It was good, though, we needed a united front because the ghost was getting bolder. He was intentionally frightening now, I was sure of it. Blinking in and out of the corners of my vision, appearing closer than ever. I saw him in mirrors and outside the window and felt him standing right behind me. I could see much more clearly why the previous tutor had been driven off. I wasn’t sleeping well again, and I found myself cracking my neck or shoulder or hip on accident much more often. I was tense most of the time. The only thing keeping me grounded was the kids, in their different ways.

Flora was not scared of Quint’s ghost at all. At first I assumed she was just being brave, like she’d been after our man in the moon discussion. Flora was too young to really understand a lot of the nuances here, after all. But there was one morning where we were all working at our respective desks or chairs and all of a sudden Flora shouted. “Go away!” And I turned to find her glaring daggers at the spectral form of Quint, looming near Miles.

Some instinct seized me, and I got the big box of salt out of my desk drawer. While Quint was focused on Flora, I opened the little spout and swung the box in the ghost’s direction. An arc of salt fell through the air and where it touched his spectral form, he disintegrated. It looked almost like the salt sucked him into it, or scattered his essence. Either way, he was gone.

“Good,” Flora said, and went back to her worksheet.

Miles and I made eye contact - he was surprised too. And after a second, he came over to me. He sat on the corner of my desk and looked across the room at nothing in particular. “Salt, huh?” he asked.

“I can get you a box of your own.” I lowered my voice before asking the next bit. “Flora doesn’t seem to be scared of him.”

He knew what I was asking. “No,” he said. “She’s not. He mostly ignored her.”

That was a twisted type of silver lining. I was still mid-thought about how to respond when Miles added, “I just kind of freeze.”

“What do you mean?”

“When I see him,” he said. “I freeze up.”

“That makes sense. You should probably talk to a psychiatrist.”

Miles wrinkled his nose up. “What, and tell them I see ghosts? I’ll get locked up.”

“Good point.”

“I’ll just talk to you,” he said, and then glanced at me. “Is that okay?”

“More than okay.”

He nodded, looking thoughtful. “Could I keep the salt with me?” he asked after a second. “Just in case?”

I gave it to him, of course, and he kept it with him most of the time. I saw the box in the crook of his arm that night on the couch, as he helped Flora with something on her Gameboy. He carried it upstairs with him. I went to check on him after I put Flora to bed, and found the box wedged between his pillow and the headboard. As I stepped into his room, something gritty crunched beneath my feet.

“I threw more at him,” Miles said before I could ask. “And he disappeared again.”

“Good.” He was curled up under his covers, reading something. I wanted to wrap him up in something thicker, protect him even more. “Miles,” I said instead. “Do you want to move your bed into Flora’s room?”

“Why?”

“Because this is kind of a lot to be alone with, at night,” I said, but that didn’t seem to resonate with him. “In case you need something, quick. Just a thought.”

Miles frowned, and didn’t answer. “What about Christmas?” he asked then.

“What do you mean?”

“Are you staying here for Christmas?”

I shook my head. “I have two weeks off.”

“Where are you going?”

“Back home, to my friends and family.”

From the look on his face I could tell this was new information. Probably, he hadn’t considered the fact that I had a life outside of Bly Manor - not the first time I’d gotten that. And I didn’t even live with my other students. “So we’ll be here with Grose?” he asked.

“I think so,” I said. I hadn’t really thought much about it. “What did you do last year?”

His face sort of shut down, he looked away from me. “Not much,” he said.

So that’s when I knew, the thing that had scared me before hadn’t gone away. It’d just gotten trickier. Even as we got closer, I couldn’t protect them from what they wouldn’t tell me about.


	11. Giving Thanks

Okay. I said I wanted to explain my thought process. The last entry did that, sure, but I just want to make things really clear. Let me lay out a few things more explicitly.

Thanksgiving was kind of dismal. The food was good, as usual, but things were just off. The giant turkey was grotesque, the kids were quiet, Mrs. Grose was solemn, and the house was colder than ever. Sure, maybe it was just that it could never be like Thanksgivings at home, but. It sucked. It was worse than any other given night, because of the sense of stifling importance. The morning after, we sat around the fire and drank cocoa and coffee and talked about the Lord of the Rings, which I’d read a couple years ago and Miles was in the middle of. It was better in basically every way.

So, surprising exactly no one who knows me, I started to think about Christmas. Thinking about whatever Miles didn’t want to tell me and the likelihood that their Christmases hadn’t been good for the past couple years, it was starting to feel like there was an increasingly obvious solution: bringing them with me.

I knew I’d need to go to Miles with it first. Flora was easier, she’d want to come if we asked. But the moment I decided I wanted to ask him, I kept second-guessing the whole idea. The kids getting to know you and my family was definitely blurring the lines. At the end of the day this was still my job, and not that I was planning on leaving, but. It was something I couldn’t take back.

Eventually, Miles came to find me about it. I was getting a snack from the kitchen when he joined me and said with no intro, “I can tell you’re thinking about something and not saying it and I think you should say it.”

I pulled my head out of the fridge and turned around to look at him.

“What?”

“Even if it’s really bad, it’s worse not saying it.”

He had a point, honestly, as much as I wanted to deny it. And then he hit me with the real leverage. “So only honesty when it’s not you?”

I shut the fridge hard. “Trying to find the right time for a conversation is not the same thing as lying,” I said.

Miles had a bit of a smirk on his face, growing as he looked at me. He pushed off the doorjamb and came over to me, hopping up to sit on the counter right next to me. “What is it?” he pushed, looking down at me.

There wasn’t really anything else to do but tell him. “I’m trying to figure out if the two of you would be interested in coming with me. Home, for Christmas. If that’d be a good idea.”

“You had to think about how to say that?”

Maybe it wasn’t good for my authority to find that as funny as I did, but I couldn’t hide my smile. “Well. I may have been overthinking it,” I admitted, and he snorted. “I want to know what you think about that, though. All the things you think. There’s no wrong answer. You want a snack?”

“Sure.”

I went back to the fridge and pulled out carrot sticks and then went rummaging through the cabinets for pretzels. I heard a crunch; Miles had helped himself to the carrots. And, as was sort of his usual move, he spoke while I wasn’t looking right at him. “Where is home?” he asked. “For you?”

“New York. My family lives in Albany, I used to live in New York City.”

“Where would we be going?”

“My parents’ house.”

“I thought it was supposed to be a break,” he said then. “Not much of a break if you bring work home with you, right?”

It was kind of horrifying, to hear exactly what I knew you’d say from the mouth of a kid. I did find the pretzels, opened the bag and had some as I thought through my answer. “Well, we wouldn’t have any classes,” I said. “But that’s part of what I’m trying to think about. Like maybe you want a break from me, that’s okay too.”

Miles rolled his eyes; I was being very stupid, in his opinion. “No,” he said.

“You aren’t work,” I told him, and then had to correct myself before he accused me of dishonesty. “Not just work.”

“Careful,” he said. “Or you’ll admit you actually kind of like us.”

“No chance of that.” One of the carrots looked kind of weird; I squinted at it. As I did, Miles got back down again. He squeezed me in a hug from the side, arm over my shoulders and then gone again before I could even react. When I looked up, he was already on the other side of the kitchen.

“I’ll think about it,” he said.

I thought about it too, a lot. It would mean something, to introduce them to my parents and siblings and you. It was a commitment. And it would be a kind of work, even though I told him it wasn’t. I didn’t know how they’d act around other people - though, that also made me sort of more determined to bring them and socialize them. It couldn’t be good for them, to only talk to me for months on end. I’d need to figure something out for that, in the long term. The thing I kept coming back to was the alternative. Me, home with my family, and them here in this dark house, haunted with no one around.

Maybe it wouldn’t be a break. But I didn’t really have much of a choice.

Once I knew I wanted them to come, I called my mom. She knew the basics of the situation from our talks over the past months. I had probably a solid fifteen minutes of explanation prepared, but I’d barely begun when she cut in. “Honey,” she said. “You know we have enough to share. If you want to bring the kids home, then do it. Why the whole spiel?”

I explained the best I could, given that I barely understood my own motivations. It was just that they weren’t family, and I was worried about how these lines were getting blurred. Mom just pointed out, like you told me too, it had been months since I’d been just their tutor. Our boundaries weren’t quite what they ought to be, if I was only hired help. On that, I had to give her the point, given that I knew Miles was waiting for me in my room. We had a habit of reading together for a little bit before bed now, after I’d tucked Flora in. We had a lot of habits.

So, the next morning before I assigned their lessons, I had the kids join me at my desk, close so we wouldn’t be overheard. Then, I laid out the situation. They had two options: come with me to my family Christmas, or stay here. Either way, I’d be getting them gifts, and they’d have two weeks without lessons. And, I added, if they came with me, I’d have some ground rules. Conduct required of them.

“Oh, please can we come?” Flora said before I was finished. “We’ll be good.”

I looked at Miles; he gave me less to work with. “What are the rules?” he asked.

I’d come up with three, for the high-stress situation we’d find ourselves in with no palatial estate to escape to another wing of. “Stick by me unless we agree on you going somewhere else. Be polite to my family. And if anything happens you don’t like, you tell me, and we’ll figure out how to fix it.”

Flora agreed. Miles thought there had to be a catch. He nodded for now, though, and let me get them started on their day. After an hour or so, he got up to get coffee and came back with some for me too.  
“Oh, thank you,” I said with surprise.

“What if I do something really bad and you don’t want me there any more?” he asked, his voice low. “Or what if you get tired of us.”

“I don’t think I will, it’s not like we’ll be spending any more time together. And I don’t think you will. That’s under your control.”

He screwed his mouth up. “Maybe I won’t know,” he said. “Maybe I’ll do it on accident.”

“Then I’ll talk to you, and we’ll work it out.” I almost asked him if he really wanted to stay, if that’s what all of this was, but then Miles added something else.

“And if he follows us there?” he said. And that clicked for me - oh, this was what he was really worried about.

“We can keep some salt on us, just in case.”

Miles nodded, face impassive.

“Do you want to come?” I asked him. “Because I’m just trying to get you what you want.”

“Yeah,” he said. “I really don’t want to be here. Grose gets really weird around Christmas. Last year we went to midnight mass. That sucked.”

That was only part of what he was thinking, I could see it on his face. But I thought he was being honest about wanting to come, so I started making our flight and plans. It was a whole thing, telling Mrs. Grose, but that was mostly boring and doesn’t need to be rehashed. The point is, we were coming for Christmas. That’s where I’ll pick up next post - I don’t want this to go on for forever.


	12. Home for the Holidays

Flying with the kids was weird. They were well-behaved and quiet, and more than that, they were much more mine than I usually thought. I couldn’t see it clearly until we were in public, but they trusted me like they didn’t trust anyone else. Flora held onto my hand almost all the time. Miles pretended not to care but the moment he lost track of me for a second that cool was broken. They were counting on me.

And the other thing I saw, with them in this new context, was how naive they were. They hadn’t flown, they hadn’t interacted with the world in any real sense since Miles came back from school. It was kind of sad.

At my parent’s house, Dad was out the moment we pulled up to help us unload the car, asked me how the flight was and then the drive and then introduced himself to the kids without giving us much time to answer. Typical Dad. Then, when we were inside, Mom gave each of us a hug and a plate of lasagna. Typical Mom. Flora and Miles didn’t seem to know quite how to handle that, at first. And then Flora began to bloom, under Dad’s questions and Mom’s attention. She started talking, telling some very important stories about the fort she built last week in the living room, and Mom and Dad listened the way they’re so good at, and Miles just listened, drawing pattern in the sauce left on his plate.

We all shared my childhood room like we would most of the next two weeks, me in bed and kids on the floor on an air mattress. The house would be full for the holidays, with my brother and his family coming in from North Carolina and my sister back from London. But tonight, it was just us.

That first night, I woke up when Miles said my name. “Salt,” he said, and I saw Quint’s spirit looming over him, a blueish white in the darkness. I got up and scrabbled through my luggage for the little container. It took a few seconds, but I got it in the end and scattered the spectral form with a few shakes. Then I stood where I was, and Miles lay flat on his back, and we just breathed.

“I should go home,” he whispered.

“What?”

“I should go home, I’m ruining it.”

I motioned him out into the hall, and he came reluctantly. “I didn’t mean now,” he said sullenly.

“I’m not kicking you out,” I said. “Come on.” I moved him by the shoulders down the hall towards the stairs. And, like Mom had done for me so many times, I made him tea.

While the water heated, I leaned against the stove and looked at him. He was sitting at the kitchen table, fidgeting with his sleeves. “I shouldn’t have come,” he said. “Of course he followed me, it’s not like I can leave him behind.”

“No,” I agreed. “You can’t leave it. But that doesn’t mean you don’t get to have fun as much as you can.”

He chewed on his lip, nodding in a way that wasn’t agreement. “I think it does, though. Like it’s dangerous.”

“He hasn’t been able to move anything for months,” I pointed out.

Miles had a new justification in a second. “I’m ruining things for other people.”

“No, you’re not.”

“You really want to be awake right now?”

I did not and would never lie to him. “Less than perfect is not ruined,” I told him. “You don’t have to be perfect.”

“I know,” he said crossly, but I wasn’t sure he did.

The kettle whistled then, and I got us both a cup brewing. He spoke before his tea was ready. “Quint said I had to earn things,” he said, his voice too flat. “Good things.”

“Okay…”

“What,” he prompted after a second. He knew my tones too well.

“He sort of had an interest in making you feel like you needed to make up for things to him, didn’t he?” I said, sliding into a seat next to him. I wrapped my hands around my warm mug. This house didn’t feel as cold as Bly Manor, though. Nothing was as cold as that, and I was so happy I didn’t leave them there.

Miles had a long sip of his tea. “Yeah,” he finally said. “I guess I hadn’t thought about it that way.”

“Yeah. That’s why what he did worked. You usually have to be older, to recognize that’s what’s going on.”

“Oh.” He drank the rest of his cup fast, sort of ruining the point of a calming cup of tea though I didn’t point that out. Then he folded his arms on the table and put his head down.

I meant to wait for him to say something else, but I found myself telling him, “None of this is your fault, anyways. It’s him. He’s the one ruining things. You aren’t responsible.”

“He won’t let me go,” Miles said.

“I’m not giving him a choice,” I said without thinking.

Miles reached out without raising his head, fumbled for my arm and then moved my hand into his hair. Mission accomplished, he crossed his arms under his head more securely and stayed where he was. I kept my hand on his head. I didn’t move, worried I’d ruin whatever he was hoping for. “Bed,” I told him. “Come on. We can talk more later.”

“One more thing,” he said, and then didn’t say anything.

“Bed,” I repeated, and he went with me up to our room again.

My brother and my sister got there the next day, and the holidays started in earnest. We’re a family of doers, and the Fairchilds fit right in. Flora was right in the middle of my brother’s three kids - Lily (12) Chris (9) Jenny (8) - and had a great time running around with them in the snow. For how much I was worried about her not fitting in with her peers, she did just fine.

Miles stayed at my side, sat next to me and listened as me and my siblings shot the shit and caught up. He pitched in when we were all putting dinner together, chopped up onions at Mom’s request. He hardly spoke to anyone, but when he did he was polite. And now that he’d done it once, he kept invading my space. Couldn’t be more different than the way he did it that first time, because it wasn’t inappropriate at all. He’d just lean against me when we were standing around talking, or sort of aggressively pull my arm around him. I saw Mom noticing it, saw her smile in the corners of her eyes for a moment every time, and I wanted to tell her she had the wrong idea but I couldn’t be sure she did.

Christmas morning was loud. Flora copied my nieces and nephew, shrieking with delight as she tore into her presents - a sweater from my parents, new games for her Gameboy from me, records from Miles. She hollered thanks out along with the rest of the kids, and then began to very importantly explain the games to everyone else listening.

Miles had less to unwrap. A specific guitar, the one and only thing he asked for. He’d brought his smallest amp to play it on, and went into a corner to plug things in and give it a test.

“He’s talented,” Mom said to me.

“He really is,” I agreed. “Especially now that he’s done using it as a sonic weapon.”

Dad snorted. “Oh, I bet that wasn’t great. Seems like that thing can get pretty loud.”

“Sure can. You know, he can pick up almost song he hears, too.” I’d found him on more than one occasion listening to the radio and playing songs back.

Dad wanted to put that to the test; he got up and said something to Miles, and then went into his office. Miles came to me before going anywhere. “Hey,” he said. “He wants to go play some records for me, is that okay?”

Of course it was, but I didn’t say that because I wanted him to keep asking me things. I said yes, and watched him go, and in a few minutes I heard Dad playing something. Then, a couple moments later, Miles picking out the same riff. Dad did well with quiet kids; I always thought of my teacher-self as a kind of mix of him and Mom. Her patience was most of it, and I could imitate how he drew people out just by being himself well enough to convince a classroom to participate. Figures the kids would reply to Dad, since they did to me.

We got going on Christmas lunch, per tradition. I was assembling the veggie tray, hearing all about my sister’s new boyfriend, when Miles came in with single-minded intensity and sort of tackled me against the counter in a hug. Over his shoulder, I exchanged looks with my sister and my mother both, and held him back with one arm while I tried to set my knife down safely with the other.

“What’s going on?” I asked. His breath felt shallow.

“I think I saw him,” he said.

Oh, not good. “Okay,” I said, and held him firmly the moment I had my arms free. “Take a deep breath.”

“Right,” he said, and got better at doing that after a couple tries. My mom and sister had the decency to keep talking and pretend they didn’t notice what was happening until Miles let go and stepped back. “Thanks,” he said, looking firmly at the floor, and left again.  
What I was left with was the knowledge that he was definitely taller than me now. It was strange, how protective of him I still felt. Or maybe it wasn’t. Maybe I had to sort out how I felt. That’s what seeing you would do, I was counting on it.

Obviously, you know where we landed on all of that when we got brunch a couple days later. I was ready to adopt them, basically. Which made the end of this so much worse.


	13. The End

This is the part I’ve been dreading explaining. Something you probably could’ve guessed, given that I sort of moved across the country to avoid it. I hope you’re not taking it personally. I promise I’ll call soon, I’ve just… I’ve needed a break.

I’m procrastinating. So. The end.

We were back a few days into the new year. The kids were almost new people, after our two weeks away. They were happier, and that’s not just me romanticizing things. Flora seemed so much better in ways I hadn’t noticed being of before. She was settled, where before she was a little desperate. She wasn’t afraid of losing my attention anymore.

And then Miles. I don’t know how else to explain this so I’ll just use how he explained it to me. Because I asked. On the plane, while Flora was asleep, I asked him about the difference. I think I said something about the way he was such a different person than before. I don’t remember, exactly. It made him embarrassed a little bit, I remember his cheeks going pink.

“I dunno, maybe it’s that you’ve actually got my back? It’s not my fault I never felt safe before,” he snapped. I remember that clearly, because it broke my heart.

I did have their backs. That’s why the first thing I did when we got back was contact their uncle. It took some doing - he really didn’t want to be bothered - but I felt really strongly. The kids needed to be around people. Both of the kids. They needed to be out in the world, not trapped in this house with literal ghosts - though I left that part of it out.

I thought I made my case pretty convincingly. Their uncle didn’t say much, he listened, and I took that as him hearing my points. And then he finally spoke.

“You’re not going to do your job. That’s what I’m hearing.”

The conversation devolved from there.

I’d like to leave it at that but I think I owe you a little more detail. Or maybe I don’t owe it to you, but I owe it to myself. I should keep this crystal clear, preserve this memory for my future self, and let it go as much as I can in the present.

First he reminded me that I’d been hired to tutor them, and that sending them to school was not my decision to make - neglecting to realize, I guess, that that’s why I’d asked him. Then he said he doubted it would really make a difference, where they were, and when I tried to explain how I knew that was wrong, he cut me off.

I could’ve fought harder. I should’ve. I have to say, in the moment I sort of froze up. The writing on the wall was clear. His tone of voice didn’t leave much to interpretation. And once he said it, he wasn’t going to take it back. He said he didn’t want to be bothered, after all, and I’d broken that fundamental rule. Never mind that that rule was traumatizing the children he was supposed to be looking out for, never mind that he was going to be making things worse. That wasn’t his concern. It never had been. I’d been deluding myself to think otherwise.

He fired me on the phone. I had two hours to pack, and then the police would escort me from the house.

Yeah.

I was still processing when Miles came in the room, asking if I was off the phone and continuing on about something he wanted to do tonight. But then he saw the look on my face, and he stopped. “What,” he said then. “What happened?”

“I don’t know how to say it,” I said. Or something like that. Documenting this will be hard, actually, now that I think about it. I was so numb, my mind had turned off.

“Just say it,” Miles said.

It wasn’t right, I didn’t have any way to soften it, so I did just tell him. I told him I’d been fired, and I had to leave now.

At first he didn’t believe me. “Yeah right,” he said. “What is it really?”

“I’m serious.”

I watched it sink in, I watched tears well up in his eyes against his will. “Why?” he asked, his voice breaking.

“Your uncle, uh.” It was impossible to sum up our conversation with any kind of euphemism. “I suggested you guys should be back at school, and he said if I wasn’t going to do my job he was giving it to someone else.”

“So take it back,” Miles said. “Or lie to him or something.”

“I tried, he wouldn’t… He didn’t want to be bothered, and I bothered him, so.” I’d never been fired before. I’d probably cry too, at some point. Once it sunk in.

“No. No! This is bullshit,” Miles said. “This is… you can’t just go.”

“I don’t want to.”

“Okay, then don’t.”

That wasn’t an option. “The police will be here soon to make sure I go,” I told him. Speaking was a struggle. “He’s going to hire a new tutor for Flora. You’ll probably get to choose if you want to go back to school, and if you can you should. Keep some salt on you, for safety, but.”

“Hold on,” he said. “Why aren’t you fighting this?”

I didn’t enjoy having to tell him this. I hated it, I’d hoped to preserve what I could of their innocence a little longer. “Because I don’t have any rights, to you. You’re not… my kids, or.”

“Yes we are,” Miles said. “He doesn’t know anything about us.”

“Doesn’t make a difference.”

“What do you mean? Of course it does.” He was saying so many thing I never thought he would articulate, but I wasn’t really processing that at the time. It was only later that I realized what he was saying, how hard it had to be. “You know us,” Miles repeated, firmly.

I did, and they knew me. But that didn’t make me their legal guardian. I did my best to explain that, but I don’t think I did a great job. Because I didn’t understand, really, either. It felt unreal. I had to pack, I had to get a flight and everything, but I couldn’t bring myself to move.

“Fine,” he said after a second. “Fuck this. I don’t even care.”

That was the last thing he said to me. He ran after that, locked himself in his bedroom and didn’t come out once. Flora didn’t take it much better. When I told her I was leaving, she asked the same unanswerable questions. I did an awful job explaining - better, I think, than I did with Miles but that wasn’t saying much. Flora turned on me, then. Not dramatically. But she was cold for the first time that I’d known her. I’d clearly betrayed her, in her mind, and she was punishing me.

Fair enough. I sort of had. And I had a lot to handle as it was.

Packing my things was a whole process, getting them out of all over the house. I hadn’t realized I’d spread out as much as I did, and once I was realizing I didn’t have the time to think about it.

I couldn’t help but knock on Miles’ door before I went. He ignored me, but I didn’t take that personally. I just slipped a note under the door. I remember exactly what I wrote.

_I’m still on your side. I’m sorry._

I debated writing a million other things, but that’s all I put in the end. Oh, and your phone number. I’m sorry. I just knew you weren’t moving any time soon, and I knew I had to go somewhere completely new. Seeing anything I knew would be unbearable, to think about who I’d been before I knew the kids or who I was with them.

I need to spend some time on my own, think about what I really want. That might be kids. Or it might’ve just been those kids.

There's a million other things I could’ve done; talked to their uncle sooner, or lied to him, or run away with them, or refuse to leave. All of them end in me getting arrested, though. But what I keep coming back to is telling him. That was the mistake. I guess just assumed he'd do the thing that made sense. Maybe that's my flaw, here. Assuming things and people will make sense. It worked, and then it worked against me.

So. If you get a call from a kid who says he knows me, please tell me. But otherwise, I need a break for a while.


	14. Update

He found me.

Thank you.


End file.
